Old Gorgon Graham eBook

I simply mention these things in a general way.
There are two branches in the study of riches—­getting
the money and keeping it from getting away. When
a fellow has saved a thousand dollars, and every nickel
represents a walk home, instead of a ride on a trolley;
and every dollar stands for cigars he didn’t
smoke and for shows he didn’t see—­it
naturally seems as if that money, when it’s invested,
ought to declare dividends every thirty days.
But almost any scheme which advertises that it will
make small investors rich quick is like one of these
Yellowstone geysers that spouts up straight from Hades
with a boom and a roar—­it’s bound
to return to its native brimstone sooner or later,
leaving nothing behind it but a little smoke, and a
smell of burned money—­your money.

If a fellow would stop to think, he would understand
that when money comes in so hard, it isn’t reasonable
to expect that it can go out and find more easy.
But the great trouble is that a good many small investors
don’t stop to think, or else let plausible strangers
do their thinking for them. That’s why
most young men have tucked away with their college
diploma and the picture of their first girl, an impressive
deed to a lot in Nowhere-on-the-Nothingness, or a beautiful
certificate of stock in the Gushing Girlie Oil Well,
that has never gushed anything but lies and promises,
or a lovely receipt for money invested in one of these
discretionary pools that are formed for the higher
education of indiscreet fools. While I reckon
that every fellow has one of these certificates of
membership in The Great Society of Suckers, I had
hoped that you would buy yours for a little less than
the Highfaluting Lulu is going to cost you. Young
men are told that the first thousand dollars comes
hard and that after that it comes easier. So
it does—­just a thousand dollars plus interest
easier; and easier through all the increased efficiency
that self-denial and self-control have given you,
and the larger salary they’ve made you worth.

It doesn’t seem like much when you take your
savings’ bank book around at the end of the
year and get a little thirty or forty dollars interest
added, or when you cash in the coupon on the bond that
you’ve bought; yet your bank book and your bond
are still true to you. But if you’d had
your thousand in one of these 50 per cent. bleached
blonde schemes, it would have lit out long ago with
a fellow whose ways were more coaxing, leaving you
the laugh and a mighty small lock of peroxide gold
hair. If you think that saving your first thousand
dollars is hard, you’ll find that saving the
second, after you’ve lost the first, is hell
and repeat.

You can’t too soon make it a rule to invest
only on your own know and never on somebody
else’s say so. You may lose some profits
by this policy, but you’re bound to miss a lot
of losses. Often the best reason for keeping
out of a thing is that everybody else is going into
it. A crowd’s always dangerous; it first
pushes prices up beyond reason and then down below
common sense. The time to buy is before the crowd
comes in or after it gets out. It’ll always
come back to a good thing when it’s been pushed
up again to the point where it’s a bad thing.